Started mediocre, and went downhill quickly - Software Engineer Walgreens Employee Review

1.0
Dec 2, 2012
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

You can "get away" with doing the bare minimum, no need to be motivated and easy to get hired. Can pay well based on your people skills, not developer skills. There are some good people there, but I imagine they will be jumping ship soon. Almost always a happy hour on Friday, or "Power pint" mid week. Not difficult to "be a rock star", just prepare to not be rewarded for it.

Cons

The worst bureaucracy I've seen. Many of the directors and above were promoted internally based on tenure rather than competency, resulting in many illogical decisions often based on emotion rather than data. Many technical decisions are made by non-technical people. When Walgreens took over, they cut the bonus to less than half of previous and replaced the benefits package; health coverage here is terrible. Because of the project structure, it can take forever to get bugs fixed (even serious ones), because there may be no team actively working on that area. Their code base has barely changed since 2001, and is a mess of spaghetti-c++ called marshaled from C# that was converted from vbscript via a tool; people are scared to touch it and implement delicate workarounds to avoid fixing core problems. The head of IT from Walgreens, now responsible for IT at drugstore is good friends with the CEO of Cognizant (CTS) contracting company, They are pushing to have the "brain trust" in the building, but have all work done overseas. (Many people are pushing back against this, but it still seems to be swinging that way).

Explore other reviews about Walgreens

5.0
Feb 2, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good company to work for

Cons

- A lot of phones ringing that you have to answer that require a lot of work that it holds you off on your current tasks for awhile. They need to do something about the phones ringing all the time.

1
3.0
Jun 25, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Can be a fun environment. All in whom your staff is. Operating photo was fun and building projects for the customers. Learning about pharmacy operations.

Cons

Work life balance and low pay for what is expected. Not having enough payroll to effectively run a store. My store ran FE on a 320 hour a week budget. That was barely enough to get buy and meet the expectations put out by the company. I was never able to keep a full leadership staff. When a leader called out, I had to stay. There were days I was called away from my own dinner table. SM's were forced to be in the pharmacy for more than half of their day regardless as to what is happening in the FE. I worked over 50 hours a week and barely got to spend time with my family. If I wasn't at the store I was getting a phone call and having to go back to the store.

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